sparrows bijou there were three in the street. one was already dead, crushed by a passing motorist. the second one had a broken wing or was at least pretending, flapping around next to him. the last one was still okay. i pulled into a driveway along third street; it was busy and the cars were flying past in all four lanes. i just looked for a moment, i didn't know quite what to do. if you save someone's life, you are responsible for it. a toyota rav 4 drove by and hit the two remaining birds. their tiny bones and feathers and blood were strewn across the lane. and god holds them in his hands. 020518 ... ancient and terrible in the fountain playing and bathing i wished i had a chameleon's tongue i envy them their short lives and pity them over their chance to die at the hands of the falcon pair that lives atop the nearby bank building or by a stupid arbitrary chace encounter with a vehicle i wanted to just snatch them out of the air and eat them - not for hunger but for some perverse, conflicted sense of both mercy and spite 020518 ... jinx Must you shoot them with a BB-gun? 020519 ... raze they always seem to somehow sense being seen. i hear them dancing on the roof above my head. the skitter and scrape of keratin on clay. when i turn to admire them, they fly away. a few are brave enough to let me toss them treats. the rest i watch from the other side of my back door's lunette window. i see fledglings being fed and listen to siblings sing what they have to say, and i think: not that i believe in any kind of god anymore, but if i did, birds would be one of her greatest gifts. as dark as things get, it's good to be reminded that there's still room for grace and beauty in the battered bark of this worn-out world. 250908 what's it to you? who go blather from